Issue 0x03 - 2017 is lying here, dead.

💾 A monthly digest of text-based game development successes, failures, inspiration, and anecdotes from the members of The MUD Coders Guild.

Greetings, adventurers!

Wow… what a year. As a community, we’ve grown a ton—and are continuing to grow every day—and the overwhelming support for this highly niche newsletter over the past few months alone has humbled me. With the year coming to a close, and new one starting, I wanted to take a moment to thank every one of the members of The MUD Coders Guild for making 2017 a year to remember. I have personally learned more than I ever expected from you nerds, and I look forward to cramming even more knowledge into my brain over the next 12 months.

P.S. - If would like to write an article for The MUD Coders Guild, or have a resource you’d like to share in an upcoming newsletter, please feel free to reply directly to this email. I would love to hear from you!

While we may generally be all about the text-based world, that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate the beauty of a well-designed graphical game engine. LÖVE is an awesome framework you can use to make
2D games in Lua. It’s free, open-source, and works on
Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android, and iOS.

We’ve come a long way since the monochromatic beauty of phosphor monitors… but not that long. Because most MUDs are still accessed via relatively antiquated telnet protocols, many of them have to work with this incredibly limited color palette.

Icicle is an in-development game engine focused on delivering single-player text-oriented experiences. It foregoes the parser and button based interfaces of traditional text and hypertext adventures in favor of first person “mouselook” style controls, and presents itself mechanically as a single verb point and click adventure game. Oh, and it supports virtual reality!

We at The MUD Coders Guild thrive on creating new and unique gaming engines, so this article is of particular interest to us. While the premise is about writing a modern game engine in 2017, it has an interesting take on entity component systems.

My heart goes out to the poor programmer who attempts to create a MUD in Prolog someday (and believe me, someone will). That said, Prolog is a fascinating language that I have some personal (and mostly positive) experience with, so this tutorial tickles my fancy in multiple ways.

While it doesn’t have to be git, we all use version control (and if you don’t, then stop what your are doing and start right freaking now). According to An Astronaut’s Guide to Life, “Flight Rules are the hard-earned body of knowledge recorded in manuals that list, step-by-step, what to do if X occurs, and why. Essentially, they are extremely detailed, scenario-specific standard operating procedures.” This is like that… but for git.

This is the second part in a three-part series about games before the modern internet and it is an absolute must read. It covers just about everything there is to know about the original MUD, created by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle.

I just discovered the fascinating world of constructed languages, or conlangs, this month and I am completely enthralled by it. There is a whole community of language geeks who devote their time creating new and interesting languages, both written and spoken, something I think we can all agree is awesome.

Slack is as ubiquitous as email at this point, so it’s no surprise that some enterprising madman created a Slack-based RPG to play. It’s easy to play for just a few minutes on your
break or lunch and make meaningful progress.
Plus, the game is turn-based, so you can pick up where you left off at a moment’s
notice!

> quit

I’m a lean dog, a keen dog, a wild dog, and lone;

I’m a rough dog, a tough dog, hunting on my own;

I’m a bad dog, a mad dog, teasing silly sheep;

I love to sit and bay the moon, to keep fat souls from sleep.

The MUD Coders Guild is a community for people with a passion for creating text-based games. Join us on Slack!